Document history

Step Functions will now auto-create roles and policy for optimized integrations with MediaConvert.

For integrations with MediaConvert, Step Functions will now automatically create the necessary roles and policies required by your state machine. To learn more, see Create an AWS Elemental MediaConvert job with Step Functions and Integrating optimized services with Step Functions.

Step Functions expands data source and output options for Distributed Map.

Distributed map can process data from JSON Lines (JSONL) and a broader range of delimited file formats, such as semicolon-delimited files and tab-delimited files. Additionally, Distributed Map offers output transformations for greater control over result formatting. To learn more, ItemReader (Map) and ResultWriter (Map).

Replaced the Getting started tutorial with content from workshop presented at re:Invent 2024.

Manage state and transform data with Step Functions workflow variables and JSONata.

With variables, you can pass data between the steps of your workflows. With JSONata, you gain an open source query and expression language to select and transform data in your workflows. To learn more, see Passing data between states with variables and Transforming data with JSONata in Step Functions.

Step Functions adds Infrastructure as Code (IaC) template generation

The Amazon Step Functions console provides the ability to export and download saved workflows as Amazon CloudFormation or Amazon SAM (SAM) templates. For Amazon Web Services Regions that support Amazon Infrastructure Composer, it additionally provides the ability to export your workflows to Infrastructure Composer and navigates to the Infrastructure Composer console, where you can continue to work with the newly generated template. To learn more, see Exporting your workflow to IaC templates.

Step Functions adds the option to use Amazon KMS and customer managed keys to encrypt your data

You can add another layer of security by choosing a customer managed key to encrypt workflows, activities, and logs. To learn more, see Data at rest encryption in Step Functions.

Document structure update

With page view data and depth analysis, documentation sections were restructured to increase visibility of important topics. The navigation was updated to reduce overall depth. Related topics were consolidated. Redirects were added so that bookmarks should lead to the updated locations. Send feedback if you notice errors or omissions after this massive update. Thank you!

Amazon managed policy updates - new permission: states:ValidateStateMachineDefinition

Added information about new permission to check the syntax of a state machine that you provide. To learn more, see Amazon managed policies for Amazon Step Functions.

Step Functions adds optimized integration for AWS Elemental MediaConvert

AWS Elemental MediaConvert provides broadcast-grade video and audio file transcoding, which customers can automate with code to suit their media workflows. With the optimized integration for Amazon Step Functions in MediaConvert, it is now possible to orchestrate using the low-code visual tool Workflow Studio. To learn more, see the documentation to Manage AWS Elemental MediaConvert with Step Functions.

Amazon managed policy updates - Update to an existing policy: AWSStepFunctionsReadOnlyAccess

Added information about new read-only permissions for tags, distributed maps, and versions and aliases. To learn more, see Amazon managed policies for Amazon Step Functions.

Step Functions adds support for Open Workflow metrics

With open workflow metrics, you now have account-level visibility into the number of standard workflows in progress as well as your open workflow limit. You can manage workloads across all workflows, regardless of how they're started, to ensure smooth workflow operations. You can set CloudWatch alarms to monitor your workflows and proactively receive alerts as you approach your limits. Once alerted, you can effectively manage your workflows by taking actions such as stopping specific workflows or requesting a limit increase.

Open workflow metrics is available to use in CloudWatch for standard workflows with no additional configuration required. To learn more, see Execution metrics.

Service integration additions and updates. For the list of new and updated Amazon SDK integrations, see Learning to use Amazon service SDK integrations in Step Functions. For the full list of services, see Supported Amazon SDK service integrations.

Use Workflow Studio in Infrastructure Composer to build serverless workflows using Amazon CloudFormation templates. For more information, see Using Workflow Studio in Infrastructure Composer to build Step Functions workflows.

Step Functions now lets you directly invoke public HTTPS endpoints and test individual states using a new Test State API. For more information, see:

Published a new topic that explains how to run state machines on a schedule using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler. For more information, see Using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler to start a Step Functions state machine execution.

Reorganized and updated the Distributed Map state topics for clarity, brevity, and establishing a clear journey map for new users. For more information, see Using Map state in Distributed mode for large-scale parallel workloads in Step Functions.

Published a new topic about deploying state machines using Terraform. For more information, see Using Terraform to deploy state machines in Step Functions.

Updated the following procedures to match changes to the Amazon EventBridge interface.

Improved the description of TimeoutSeconds and HeartbeatSeconds fields to describe how they're different from each other. For more information, see Task state fields.

Published a new section that describes how to flatten an array of arrays typically returned as result for Parallel and Map states. For more information, see Flattening an array of arrays.

Update

Step Functions has expanded support for Amazon SDK integrations by adding seven Amazon Web Services services and 468 new API actions. For more information, see Supported Amazon SDK service integrations and Learning to use Amazon service SDK integrations in Step Functions.

Documentation-only update

Added a new section that explains about the permissions needed to write child workflow execution results to an Amazon S3 bucket encrypted with an Amazon Key Management Service (Amazon KMS) key. For more information, see IAM permissions for Amazon KMS key encrypted Amazon S3 bucket.

Added a new topic that explains about the Data flow simulator feature. For more information, see Data flow simulator (unsupported).

Added information about default quota of 1000 for open Map Runs in each account. For more information, see Quotas related to accounts.

Added a Note about unavailability of X-Ray tracing for the Distributed Map state. For more information, see Trace Step Functions request data in Amazon X-Ray.

Added information about how Step Functions handles tag-based authorization. For more information, see Tagging state machines and activities in Step Functions and Creating tag-based IAM policies in Step Functions.

Added information about how Step Functions parses CSV files used as input in Distributed Map state. For more information, see CSV file in an Amazon S3 bucket.

Added information about how Step Functions handles cross-account invocations for the Run a Job (.sync) pattern. For more information, see Run a Job (.sync).

Reduce the history retention period of your completed workflow executions from 90 days to 30 days. For more information about adjusting the retention period, see Execution guarantees in Step Functions workflows and Quotas related to state machine executions.

Step Functions has expanded support for Amazon SDK integrations by adding 35 Amazon services and 1100 new API actions. For more information, see Supported Amazon SDK service integrations and Learning to use Amazon service SDK integrations in Step Functions.

Published a Getting Started tutorial series that walks you through the process of creating a workflow for credit card application using Step Functions. For more information, see Learn how to get started with Step Functions.

Step Functions adds support to orchestrate large-scale parallel workflows for data processing using a new Distributed mode for Map state. For more information, see Using Map state in Distributed mode for large-scale parallel workloads in Step Functions.

Step Functions now provides a new console experience for viewing and debugging Express workflow executions. For more information see:

Added support to optionally specify the ExecutionRoleArn parameter while using the addStep and addStep.sync APIs for the Amazon EMR optimized service integration. For more information, see Create and manage Amazon EMR clusters with Step Functions.

Added a new topic that provides recommendations about optimizing cost while building serverless workflows using Step Functions. For more information, see Optimizing costs using Express Workflows.

Update

Step Functions adds support for 14 new intrinsic functions for performing data processing tasks, such as array manipulations, data encoding and decoding, hash calculations, JSON data manipulation, math function operations, and unique identifier generation.

Documentation-only update:

Grouped all the existing and newly introduced intrinsic functions into the following categories based on the type of data processing task they help you perform:

For more information, see Intrinsic functions for JSONPath states in Step Functions .

August 31, 2022

Step Functions has expanded support for Amazon SDK integrations by adding three more Amazon services – Amazon Billing Conductor, Amazon GameSparks, and Amazon Pinpoint SMS and Voice V2. For more information, see Learning to use Amazon service SDK integrations in Step Functions.

Added a new topic to include a summary of all the updates made to Amazon SDK integrations supported by Step Functions. For more information, see Learning to use Amazon service SDK integrations in Step Functions

Amazon Step Functions Developer Guide now includes details about the execution metrics that are emitted specifically for Express Workflows. For more information, see Execution metrics for Express Workflows.

Step Functions console enhancements

The console now features a redesigned Execution Details page that includes the following enhancements:

Documentation-only updates

Added a new topic to explain the various types of information displayed in the Execution Details page. Also, added a tutorial to show how to examine this information. For more information, see:

Update

Step Functions now provides a workaround to prevent the confused deputy security issue, which arises when an entity (a service or an account) is coerced by a different entity to perform an action. For more information, see:

May 02, 2022

Update

April 19, 2022

New feature

Step Functions Local now supports Amazon SDK integration and mocking of service integrations. For more information, see:

January 28, 2022

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now supports creating an Amazon API Gateway REST API with synchronous express state machine as backend integration using the Amazon Cloud Development Kit (Amazon CDK). For more information, see:

December 10, 2021

Update

Step Functions has added three new sample projects that demonstrate the integration of Step Functions and Amazon Athena's upgraded console. For more information, see:

November 22, 2021

New feature

Step Functions has added Amazon VPC endpoints support for Synchronous Express Workflows. For more information, see:

November 15, 2021

Update

Amazon Step Functions has added three new sample projects that demonstrate how to use the Step Functions Amazon Batch integration. For more information, see:

October 14, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions has added Amazon SDK integrations, letting you use the API actions for all of the more than two hundred Amazon services. For more information, see:

September 30, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions has added a visual workflow designer, the Amazon Step Functions Workflow Studio. For more information, see:

June 17, 2021

Update

Amazon Step Functions has added four new APIs, StartBuildBatch, StopBuildBatch, RetryBuildBatch and DeleteBuildBatch, to the CodeBuild integration. For more information, see:

June 4, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon EventBridge. For more information, see:

May 14, 2021

Update

Amazon Step Functions has added a new sample project that shows how to use Step Functions and the Amazon Redshift Data API to run an ETL/ELT workflow. For more information, see:

April 16, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions has a new data flow simulator in the console. For more information, see:

April 8, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon EMR on EKS. For more information, see:

March 29, 2021

Update

YAML support for state machine definitions has been added to Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and Amazon CloudFormation. For more information, see:

March 4, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon Glue DataBrew. For more information, see:

January 6, 2021

New feature

Amazon Step Functions Synchronous Express Workflows are now available, giving you an easy way to orchestrate microservices. For more information, see:

November 24, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon API Gateway. For more information, see:

November 17, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. For more information, see:

November 16, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon Athena. For more information, see:

October 22, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now supports tracing end-to-end workflows with Amazon X-Ray, giving you full visibility across state machine executions and making it easier to analyze and debug your distributed applications. For more information, see:

September 14, 2020

Amazon Step Functions now supports payload sizes up to 256 KiB of data as a UTF-8 encoded string. This lets you process larger payloads in both Standard and Express workflows.

Your existing state machines do not need to be changed in order to use the larger payloads. However, you will need to update to the latest versions of the Step Functions SDK and Local Runner to use the updated APIs. For more information, see:

Update

The Amazon States Language has been updated as follows:

August 13, 2020

Amazon Step Functions now supports the Amazon SageMaker AI CreateProcessingJob API call. For more information, see:

New feature

Amazon Step Functions is now supported by Amazon Serverless Application Model, making it easier to integrate workflow orchestration into your serverless applications. For more information, see:

May 27, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon CodeBuild. For more information, see:

May 5, 2020

Step Functions is now supported in Amazon Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, making it easier to create and visualize state machine based workflows without leaving your code editor.

Update

You can now configure logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs for Standard workflows. For more information, see:

February 25, 2020

New feature

Amazon Step Functions can now be accessed without requiring a public IP address, directly from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). For more information, see:

December 23, 2019

New feature

Express Workflows are a new workflow type, suitable for high-volume event processing workloads such as IoT data ingestion, streaming data processing and transformation, and mobile application backends.

For more information, review the following new and updated topics.

December 3, 2019

New feature

Amazon Step Functions now integrates with Amazon EMR. For more information, see:

November 19, 2019

Update

Amazon Step Functions has released the Amazon Step Functions Data Science SDK. For more information, see the following.

November 7, 2019

Update

Step Functions now supports more API actions for Amazon SageMaker AI, and includes two new sample projects to demonstrate the functionality. For more information, see the following.

October 3, 2019

Step Functions supports starting new workflow executions by calling StartExecution as an integrated service API. See:

Step Functions includes the ability to pass a task token to integrated services, and pause the execution until that task token is returned with SendTaskSuccess or SendTaskFailure. See:

Step Functions now provides a way to access dynamic information about your current execution directly in the "Parameters" field of a state definition. See:

Step Functions supports CloudWatch Events for execution status changes, see:

Step Functions supports IAM permissions using tags. For more information, see:

Step Functions Local is now available. You can run Step Functions on your local machine for testing and development. Step Functions Local is available for download as either a Java application, or as a Docker image. See Testing state machines with Step Functions Local (unsupported).

Amazon Step Functions is now available in the Beijing and Ningxia regions.

Step Functions supports resource tagging to help track your cost allocation. You can tag state machines on the Details page, or through API actions. See Tagging state machines and activities in Step Functions.

Amazon Step Functions is now available in the Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo) regions.

Amazon Step Functions is now available the Europe (Stockholm) region.

New feature

Step Functions now integrates with some Amazon services. You can now directly call and pass parameters to the API of these integrated services from a task state in the Amazon States Language. For more information, see:

November 29, 2018

Update

Improved the description of TimeoutSeconds and HeartbeatSeconds in the documentation for task states. See Task workflow state.

October 24, 2018

Update

Improved the description for the Maximum execution history size limit and provided a link to the related best practices topic.

October 17, 2018

Update

Added a new tutorial to the Amazon Step Functions documentation: See Starting a Step Functions workflow in response to events.

September 25, 2018

Update

Removed the entry Maximum executions displayed in Step Functions console from the limits documentation. See Step Functions service quotas.

September 13, 2018

Update

Added a best practices topic to the Amazon Step Functions documentation on improving latency when polling for activity tasks. See Avoiding latency when polling for activity tasks.

August 30, 2018

Update

Improved the Amazon Step Functions topic on activities and activity workers. See Learn about Activities in Step Functions.

August 29, 2018

Update

Improved the Amazon Step Functions topic on CloudTrail integration. See Recording Step Functions API calls with Amazon CloudTrail.

August 7, 2018

Update

Added JSON examples to Amazon CloudFormation tutorial. See Using Amazon CloudFormation to create a workflow in Step Functions.

June 23, 2018

Update

Added a new topic on handling Lambda service errors. See Handle transient Lambda service exceptions.

June 20, 2018

Amazon Step Functions is now available the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.

Amazon Step Functions is now available the Amazon GovCloud (US-West) region. For information about using Step Functions in the Amazon GovCloud (US-West) Region, see Amazon GovCloud (US).

Update

Improved documentation on error handling for Parallel states. See Error Handling.

June 20, 2018

Update

Improved documentation about Input and Output processing in Step Functions. Learn how to use InputPath, ResultPath, and OutputPath to control the flow of JSON through your workflows, states, and tasks. See:

June 7, 2018

Update

Improved code examples for parallel states. See Parallel workflow state.

June 4, 2018

New feature

You can now monitor API and Service metrics in CloudWatch. See Monitoring Step Functions metrics using Amazon CloudWatch.

May 25, 2018

Amazon Step Functions is now available the US West (N. California) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions. See Amazon Services by Region for a list of supported regions.

Updated procedures and images to match changes to the interface.

Added a new tutorial that shows how to start a new execution to continue your work. See Continue long-running workflows using Step Functions API (recommended). This tutorial describes a design pattern that can help avoid some service limitations. See Starting new executions to avoid reaching the history quota in Step Functions.

Improved introduction to states documentation by adding conceptual information about state machines. See Discovering workflow states to use in Step Functions.

See Example: Activity Worker in Ruby.

See Creating a Step Functions state machine that uses Lambda.

See Creating granular permissions for non-admin users in Step Functions.

See Using Amazon S3 ARNs instead of passing large payloads in Step Functions.

Available sample projects include:

Added a note to clarify Lambda.Unknown errors and linked to the Lambda documentation in the following sections:

Corrected and clarified IAM instructions and updated the screenshots in all tutorials.

Rewrote the IAM instructions in the following sections to reflect changes in the IAM console:

Rewrote the State Machine Data section.

The limits related to API action throttling are increased for all regions where Step Functions is available.

September 18, 2017

September 14, 2017

Rewrote the following tutorials to reflect changes in the Lambda console:

August 28, 2017

Step Functions is available in Europe (London).

August 23, 2017

The visual workflows of state machines let you zoom in, zoom out, and center the graph.

August 21, 2017

New feature

When you make multiple StartExecution calls with the same name, the new execution doesn't run.

For more information, see the name request parameter of the StartExecution API action in the Amazon Step Functions API Reference.

Added information about an alternative way of passing the state machine ARN to the Creating a Step Functions API using API Gateway tutorial.

August 17, 2017

August 10, 2017

New feature

Update

Updated the instructions in the Step 1: Create an IAM Role for API Gateway section.

July 18, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Choice workflow state section.

Update

Added information about using resources under other Amazon accounts to the following tutorials:

June 22, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the following sections:

June 21, 2017

Update

Rewrote all tutorials to match the Step Functions console refresh.

New feature

Step Functions is available in Asia Pacific (Sydney).

June 8, 2017

Update

Restructured the Using Amazon States Language to define Step Functions workflows section.

June 7, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Creating an Activity state machine using Step Functions section.

June 6, 2017

Update

Corrected the code examples in the State machine examples using Retry and using Catch section.

June 5, 2017

Update

Restructured this guide using Amazon documentation standards.

May 31, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Parallel workflow state section.

May 25, 2017

Update

Merged the Paths and Filters sections into the Processing input and output in Step Functions section.

May 24, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the Monitoring Step Functions metrics using Amazon CloudWatch section.

May 15, 2017

Update

Updated the GreeterActivities.java worker code in the Creating an Activity state machine using Step Functions tutorial.

May 9, 2017

Update

Added an introductory video to the What is Step Functions? section.

April 19, 2017

Update

Corrected and clarified information in the following tutorials:

April 19, 2017

Update

Added information about Lambda templates to the Creating a Step Functions state machine that uses Lambda and Handling error conditions using a Step Functions state machine tutorials.

April 6, 2017

Update

Changed the "Maximum input or result data size" limit to "Maximum input or result data size for a task, state, or execution" (32,768 characters). For more information, see Quotas related to task executions.

March 31, 2017

New feature

March 21, 2017

New feature

March 16, 2017

New feature

Step Functions is available in Europe (Frankfurt).

March 7, 2017

Update

Reorganized the topics in the table of contents and updated the following tutorials:

February 23, 2017

New feature

February 23, 2017

New feature

February 14, 2017

New feature

February 10, 2017

Update

Clarified the current behavior of the ResultPath and OutputPath fields in relation to Parallel states.

February 6, 2017

Update

January 5, 2017

Update

Updated Lambda function examples to use the latest programming model.

December 9, 2016

Initial release

Initial release of Amazon Step Functions.

December 1, 2016